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Eggstraordinary Sole Member of the 'I made the 5000th Post in the Subtle Spamfest Thread' Club and Owner of the Longest User Title On Playstuff

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Off to do stuff for King and Country

...or at least sort of. As some of you know, I'm leaving to do my part for the homeland in the form of obligatory military service on Monday. What this practically means is that I'll be gone for the next two weeks and will be offline for most of the time, other than some weekends, from there on out. The service will last for either half a year or a whole 12 months, depending on whether they put me in officer training or not. I'm not particularly excited about this, especially since the whole thing is making me put my studies on hold, but since the government wants me to learn how to shoot, I don't really have a say. Hey, maybe I'll gain something from all of this, you never know. Anyway, don't be surprised if I won't be online very much for a while. Wish me luck!

Here's a short presentation on what I will be learning during the coming months:

An "ickled onion" from an unknown country

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Re: Off to do stuff for King and Country

Sorry you have to do this but I've known a few people who have done Finnish National Service and they mostly say it's not as bad as it seems - try to get a useful speciality after basic training - try to drop lots of hints about computers/IT and try to go for the Finnish equivalent of the Signals (UK army branch who deal with all communications including all of the IT stuff - loads of my work colleagues leant UNIX/Linux in the signals so it paid off for them as they got well paid careers out of service).

More than anything, use the time to learn as much as you can about everything - it's free training after all and have as much fun as you can without killing anyone. Oh, also make as many contacts as you can - they'll help you a lot in later life, trust me
If nothing else, just be thankful you're not in the Israeli army - they pretty much go straight onto the front line (although it pains me to describe Palestine as a front line but that's a different story)

---(aka JennyCide.ps)putting the Rage in Averagegromblog (inactive at present)Twitter

Eggstraordinary Sole Member of the 'I made the 5000th Post in the Subtle Spamfest Thread' Club and Owner of the Longest User Title On Playstuff

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Re: Off to do stuff for King and Country

Yeah, I'm not too worried about it. I'm sure it'll be fine, I'm just not thrilled about having to spend extra time doing something that probably won't benefit me in any way in the future. Also goddamnit, it snowed last night, just when I hoped to have a nice, snowless, dry winter.

And for your enjoyment...

An "ickled onion" from an unknown country

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Eggstraordinary Sole Member of the 'I made the 5000th Post in the Subtle Spamfest Thread' Club and Owner of the Longest User Title On Playstuff

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Re: Off to do stuff for King and Country

So, it's been three weeks. I'm on my second weekend off now, holy crap am I tired. Last week especially was really tough, we spent pretty much the whole week outside skiing, shooting and learning how to dig mines into the ground. Generally speaking it's been pretty fun, my "roommates" are fun guys to be around and I find living in the 'corps surprisingly enjoyable. Well, the overnight camp last week was pretty gnarly, but otherwise it's been cool. I was assigned to the artillery, I'll probably specialise in directing artillery fire when my basic training period is over. The worst things so far have been some of the complete morons you have to tolerate, and being excessively tired on vacations. Also I caught a really bad cough over a week ago, I should probably do something about it at some point.

And if I gain nothing else from all of this, at least I can say I've fired and can assemble/disassemble one of these. And you can't help but feel badass when you're in a forest in the middle of the night, in full snow camo and a tactical vest, with a rifle in your hand.

Eggstraordinary Sole Member of the 'I made the 5000th Post in the Subtle Spamfest Thread' Club and Owner of the Longest User Title On Playstuff

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Re: Off to do stuff for King and Country

Hah, you wouldn't believe the amount of whinging and moaning I hear every day. I guess the whole thing does sound amazing to an outsider, but when you actually have to be there, it's the worst thing ever to most people. And I have to say, it's not that easy to wake up at 5 or 6 in the morning every day and spend the whole day in the freezing cold outside. That reminds me, I need to put my army clothes on and get going in a minute, don't want to miss my bus...

An "ickled onion" from an unknown country

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Eggstraordinary Sole Member of the 'I made the 5000th Post in the Subtle Spamfest Thread' Club and Owner of the Longest User Title On Playstuff

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Re: Off to do stuff for King and Country

The mines aren't all that fancy. They're essentially 10kg blocks of TNT that blow up when 150kg of weight is put on them. You twist your entrenching tool (a foldable spade) so that it looks a bit like a pick and bash a hole in the ground (or snow). Then you lob the thing in there, apply the fuse part and cover the whole thing up. And there you have it, drive on that baby in a tank, you're stuck. Drive on it in a truck, you're toast.

What's really starting to bug me about this thing is, that the weekends are too short to fully recover from a week of kicking ass and chewing bubble gum. Also, every time I'm home I feel really out-of-place and can't think of anything to do. When you're under constant stress and always in a hurry to do something, free time just feels dull and boring. And even though I'd love to spend the nights out with buddies, I'm too tired to go anywhere. Today was a good example, I was so tired at 10pm that I decided to stay home instead of going to a friend's house to make drinks. I've been sober for over a month, this can't be normal!

An "ickled onion" from an unknown country

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